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Gameplay is on a plane with a mountainoushorizon featuring an erupting volcano, distant crescent moon, and various geometric solids (in vector outline) like pyramids and blocks. The player views the screen, which includes an overhead radar view to find and destroy the rather slow tanks, or the faster moving supertanks. Saucer-shaped UFOs and guided missiles occasionally appear for a bonus opportunity. The saucers differ from the tanks in that they do not fire upon the player, and do not appear on radar. The player can hide behind the solids or maneuver in rapid turns once fired on to buy time with which to fire himself.

No additional tanks are awarded until the score counter rolls over at ten million, and additional bonus tanks are again awarded at indicated scores of 15,000 and 100,000. The game only includes one hostile enemy on the game board at all times; the player never has to battle two enemy tanks at once, or a tank and guided missile. The UFO can appear on the screen at the same time as an enemy tank, and it can occasionally be destroyed by enemy fire.

The geometric solid obstacles are indestructible, and can block the movement of a player's tank. However, they are also useful as shields as they block enemy fire as well.

The cabinet of this arcade version of Battlezone has a "periscope" and two joysticks, for controlling the movement of the player's tank.

Battlezone was housed in a standard upright arcade cabinet with a novel "periscope" viewfinder which the player used to view the game. The game action could also be viewed from the sides of the viewfinder for spectators to watch. A later, less common version of the cabinet removed the periscope to improve visibility to non-players and improve the ergonomics for players who could not reach the periscope. This modification also was welcomed by some operators, who felt that the small windows present in the "periscoped" version did not attract enough attention to the game when played.

A smaller version of the cabinet (known as a "cabaret cabinet") also existed with the screen angled upwards, and no periscope. A cocktail table version was tested as a prototype but not produced; it lacked the color overlays as the display would have to flip for opposing players.

The controls consisted of left and right joysticks, which could only be moved in the Y (vertical) axis, each controlling the treads on that side of the player's tank. One joystick contained a button used to fire projectiles at enemy targets.

A standard enemy tank in the player's sights in the military training version The Bradley Trainer.

A version called The Bradley Trainer (also known as Army Battlezone or Military Battlezone) was also designed for use by the U.S. Army as targeting training for gunners on the Bradley Fighting Vehicle.[3] Approaching Atari in December 1980, some developers within Atari refused to work on the project because of its association with the Army,[4] most notably original Battlezone programmer Ed Rotberg.[5] Rotberg only came on board after he was promised by management that he would never be asked to do anything with the military in the future.[6] Only two were produced; one was delivered to the Army and is presumed lost, and the other is in the private collection of Scott Evans,[7][8] who found it by a dumpster in the rear parking lot at Midway Games. The gunner yoke was based on the Bradley Fighting Vehicle control and was later re-used in the popular Star Wars game.[6] The Bradley Trainer differs dramatically from the original Battlezone as it features helicopters, missiles, and machine guns; furthermore, the actual tank does not move—the guns simply rotate.

Because of its use of first-person pseudo 3D graphics combined with a "viewing goggle" that the player puts his or her face into, Battlezone is sometimes considered the first virtual reality arcade game.[9]

In July, 2013, Rebellion bought the Battlezone franchise from the Atari bankruptcy proceedings.[12] On October 13, 2016, they plan to release a remake of the original Battlezone on PlayStation 4 for PlayStation VR, and on Steam for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.

A Battlezone clone for Apollo Domain/OS called bzone was written by Justin S. Revenaugh in 1986 and re-written for the X Window System by Todd Mummert in 1990. The X Window System version, cbzone, differed from the original arcade version in that the player could be attacked by more than one enemy tank at the same time. This version of the game was also ported to the Macintosh in the 1990s and was included in the UMich software archive.[15]

Another clone from Design Design software called Tank Busters[16] was released in the mid-80s for the Amstrad CPC.

The 1991 Macintosh tank game Spectre and its sequels owe much to Battlezone for their gameplay and appearance.

The SGI workstations had a Battlezone derived game in the early 1990s called BZ which added network play.[17]BZ also had guided missiles, where the player would fly the missile after launch, returning to the tank on impact. This version evolved into the game BZFlag with a 'capture-the-flag' mode where flags can change the tank's abilities.